


we all need someone to drive us mad

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banter, Bickering, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Fluff, Fun with Tropes, Light Angst, briefly, season one AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-15 03:59:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 11,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4592082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time that Jemma Simmons met Leo Fitz, they were both seventeen and she knew from the moment that he scowled at her that he was going to be the bane of her existence. </p><p>Ten years later, they still don't like each other.  Except when they do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i've met someone that makes me feel seasick (oh, what a skill to have)

**Author's Note:**

> This starts roughly around the events of T.A.H.I.T.I. in the AOS Season one chronology.
> 
> Fic title from "Our Perfect Disease" by the Wombats.

The first time that Jemma Simmons met Leo Fitz, they were both seventeen and she knew from the moment that he scowled at her that he was going to be the bane of her existence. However, because she was polite, she smiled at him and introduced herself. He just stared at her like she'd dropped in from Mars for the day and finally, when prodded by another student, introduced himself with a face that suggested he'd quite like to never talk to her again. And for the next two years at the Academy, that was that. He tried to show her up in every class, used up all the tea bags and never bothered to refill the kettle in the student labs, arranged for explosions in his adjoining lab space just when she was trying to concentrate, and never spoke more than ten words in a row to her. Most of them consisted of the names of various lab supplies he wanted from her. 

When they graduated, she went to Sci-Tech and he went into the private sector (Stark Industries, everyone said) and Jemma comforted herself with the thought that she'd never have to see him shoot her another skeptical blue-eyed look. And she did beat him out for valedictorian, thank you. There had been moments, watching him sketch designs during one of their History of SHIELD lectures or hearing him describe one of his new prototypes to a professor, that she'd wondered if perhaps they could have worked together. Biochemists needed engineers, after all, and vice versa. But then he'd correct her in class again or determinedly avoid her at any kind of social event, and she'd concluded that any kind of project they paired off on was bound for disaster.

Which was why she felt so alarmed now, standing in his office at Stark Industries and hoping against hope that he had a miracle up his sleeve. The rest of her team was off after GH-325 but they'd sent her off here to see if Stark had any kind of new medical technology that could help Skye, still barely breathing in her hospital bed. She was the only one even remotely qualified to decide what might work and besides, Jemma had the nagging feeling that they'd sent her out on this mission to keep her out of the field. Throwing yourself on a dendrotoxin grenade seemed to make people worry about you, strangely enough.

“Agent Simmons,” Fitz said stiffly, aimlessly shuffling a stack of papers on his desk. “How can I help you?”

“One of our agents was severely injured during an operation. She's stable for the moment, and with the doctors at a SHIELD base, but we're not sure how long it'll take her to recover. Or if she'll be able to go back to duty afterward.” _Or if she even will_ , Jemma added silently. She'd been going to sit by Skye's bed whenever she had a moment of free time, bothering her doctors with questions and compiling a stack of trashy magazines for Skye to read when she woke up, until they'd taken her along with them on the Bus, still unconscious in her hospital bed, and left Jemma behind. 

“I'm sorry, Agent Simmons, but unless you want us to put an arc reactor in her chest, I'm not sure if there's anything we can do.” He finally managed to look at her as he said, only to immediately snap his eyes back down to his paperwork. Just in case there had been any doubt that ten years later, he still disliked her.

“You're Stark Industries,” she snapped. “Don't you have anything in development that could help her? Something that speeds the healing process? Or can monitor her vitals?”

“Even if we did, I wouldn't give a patient in critical condition something that's not even tested?” Fitz raised an eyebrow at her. “Never took the Hypocratic Oath, did you, Dr. Simmons?”

“I'm not that kind of doctor,” she said through gritted teeth. “But I'm the closest thing this team has and since they apparently don't trust me on operations anymore, I can't go back empty-handed. Jump out of a plane once and then--”

“You jumped out of a plane?” Fitz blurted out. He half rose from his seat before dropping back down, eyes wide and alarmed.

“There was a virus. I thought that the antidote didn't work, but it did and one of our specialists went after me so...no harm done in the end, I guess?” Except for the dreams that woke her up for months afterward, the ones where she fell and fell and never stopped. Except for the fact that even now, she still felt uncomfortable whenever she happened to glance over at the ramp on the Bus and had turned around all her lab equipment so she could look at the wall instead of out. Except for the fact that she'd needed the entire team's encouragement to get halfway up a fallen tree. But someone who looked at her with nothing but dislike didn't need to hear any of that and Jemma pushed all of those thoughts to the back of her mind, where they belonged. Back to bickering in a minute, she thought firmly. That's where her relationship (her nemesis-ship?) with Fitz belonged. “The delivery method I came up for the vaccine was a little crude, so there's side effects sometimes. Things sometimes have a bad habit of floating around me,” she added and tried to laugh. Even she could hear that it sounded false.

“Well...that, ah, that explains the mug of pens floating behind your shoulder. I thought Hank from genetics was playing another prank on us. It's a rivalry thing, it's been going on forever, and it's not really relevant, is it? Ten years later and I still can't figure out what exactly to say to you,” he mumbled under his breath, quiet enough that she almost didn't catch it. He looked relived when she didn't say anything about it, the edges of her mouth nearly curving into a smile instead, and for a moment Jemma thought maybe they could reach some kind of detente, move past how they'd hated each other all those years ago. After all, he'd already said more than ten words to her, hadn't he? But then his face shut down again, like he'd said more than he meant to, and he shut the file on his desk with an audible snap as the locks on it activated. “I...I'm sorry, Agent Simmons. For what happened to you and to your friend. But I don't have anything that could help.”

“I find that hard to believe.” Jemma folded her arms across her chest and leaned back in her chair. She couldn't go back without having accomplished anything, after everyone else had been out storming secret bases and searching for obscure (probably incredibly dangerous) serums and if she got to annoy someone who just couldn't let a schoolyard rivalry go, even better. “At the very least, you could let me see and decide for myself. I've got all day to look around.” She stared right at him, or at least at his tie, and tried to mimic May's best death glare.

“Fine,” Fitz sighed, a minute and a half later. “But you'll have to sign a few non-disclosure agreements first. Meaning ten or so. One of for each department, and an average of five signatures per department.”

“Ten different agreements?” Next thing she knew, he was going to be asking her for fingerprint and retinal scans. 

“The last time that SHIELD came to Stark Industries, Nick Fury stole one of my bloody prototypes. Just lifted it off the table and walked off with it, and now I'm not allowed to market it to the general public,” Fitz said indignantly. “And, by the way, we'll be wanting your fingerprints and retinal scans too. Just for security purposes.”

It took her an hour to get through all the different security procedures and it took him five hours to get rid of her, after walking her through every last one of Stark's departments. During that time, they disagreed on about eighty-one different topics. She walked away without a prototype but with his grudgingly extracted contact information (“just in case you need to tell someone that they're wrong on a regular basis”). He walked away with a pounding headache but a smug smile. They decided to call it a draw.

A month later, SHIELD had splintered apart into HYDRA-shaped pieces and she showed up on his doorstep with five other agents in tow, three new bruises, two lab notebooks that she'd managed to save, and one very battered business card with his information on it.


	2. I never give you my number (I only give you my situation)

“I'm only letting you in because Pepper would kill me if I didn't,” he informed her as he stood in his doorway, warily eying the bedraggled team behind her. “And no one wears shoes inside the house, especially muddy boots. I have hardwood floors.”

“Well,” the dark-haired girl behind Simmons said. “It's an improvement over a secret underground shelter in the snowy wasteland of Canada. I especially liked all the different scanners in the elevator, although releasing knock-out gas for anyone who isn't authorized seems a little harsh—like, what happens to the pizza guy?” (As a matter of fact, there was exactly one pizza guy, who'd gone through two separate background checks with Stark security, and who'd happily volunteered a DNA sample in exchange for truly enormous tips. Pepper had recommended him.) “Do you give out lanyards too?” the girl added.

“Lanyards are for amateurs,” Fitz blurted out. No. Bad. Not the point. He focused back on Simmons. “I tried to get in touch with you, when I heard about what happened in DC, but it was like you'd disappeared from the system and I thought something had happened to you and I was...never mind what I was, didn't you guys have all kinds of secret bases? Equipped with the latest technology and in hard-to-find locations and not my flat?”

“HYDRA sleeper agents knew about their secret bases. Including one of their team members,” someone else said from behind Simmons. Wait. Was that _Maria Hill_ standing in his hallway? Shit, Pepper would really kill him if he didn't roll out the welcome mat (metaphorically and literally) for Maria and offer her a selection of his finest snacks. So he stepped aside and let them all file in and as Simmons passed through his door, he very nearly reached out and did _something_. Asked her if she really was okay, offered her the use of his first-aid kit for those bruises, even wrapped his arms around her in a sure-to-be-awkward hug like his hands had been itching to do. But he still didn't know what to do around Jemma Simmons, despite his faint conviction that as much as he liked arguing with her he'd like not arguing with her even more, and so instead he leaned back against the wall of his foyer and wondered how exactly he was going to explain having a rogue team of SHIELD agents in his flat to his boss. Never mind the US government.

Twenty minutes later, they were sprawled out around his living room with six boxes of pizza, two of his laptops, which Skye eyed longingly (definitely the team's hacker then), and all the beer Fitz had been able to find in his fridge. He'd pressed the first aid kit upon all of them, paid for all the pizzas with the Stark Industries credit card—technically, the Avengers Initiative had been part of SHIELD, hadn't it?--and was now listening to a story of a group of people with epically awful luck. “So you need to find a plane? That has one evil mastermind and his jerky henchman on it, along with a hard drive with all of your security information?” he asked slowly. “Because the odds don't sound great on that one.”

“The hard drive's blank. I wiped it while we were in the diner,” Skye said smugly. “That asshole could go high enough to exit Earth's atmosphere and still have nothing.” The man with the spectacular facial hair—Fitz thought his name was Trip—grinned proudly over at her and whispered something under his breath that sounded like “Damn, girl”.

“May I suggest calling the Avengers?” Fitz offered hopefully. “One of them's my boss and he could probably blast a few things with the suit and round up the bad guys.”

“This isn't an Avengers-level problem,” Phil Coulson put in. Fitz had been too busy processing the fact that Coulson was apparently back from the dead to really register what it meant. In fact, he'd briefly thought he was going insane when he'd spotted the SHIELD legend lurking outside his door. But now, he was very aware that that Coulson was very, _very_ real and he had the sinking feeling that the state of SHIELD (if it even had any kind of state to exist in anymore) was very, very bad. “It's a problem that we helped create,” Coulson added. “And it's a problem that we're going to fix once we're able to track that plane.”

“Which requires a plan that they're not going to tell me about so I won't have to lie under oath when it inevitably goes wrong and the government hauls me in for questioning,” Maria Hill said dryly and snagged another piece of pizza. “I think the real reason Nick faked his own death was so he could avoid testifying at all those hearings.”

“You know, I could probably just...” Fitz hesitated. This was a bad idea, a really bad idea. What he was about to suggest was almost definitely illegal and he'd probably already broken a law or five by harboring fugitives from justice. (Not to mention the security measures he'd installed in his apartment to protect against corporate espionage.) And yes, technically they hadn't done anything wrong but, judging from the stories he'd already heard about General Talbot, the military had temporarily discarded the idea of innocent until proven guilty when it came to SHIELD/HYDRA. How very American of them. Then Jemma Simmons arched an eyebrow at him, already smirking like she didn't believe his idea would be any good at all, and he felt that same need to prove that he was just as good, even better, than her and wipe that infuriating smirk off her perfectly pink lips. “We might be able to get some tracking on it at Stark headquarters. Tony's off at some kind of billionaires' convention and he made Bruce go along with him, so it's just Pepper. And she'll probably turn a blind eye as long as I don't cause any international crises or interfere with her lunch break. And I'll probably have to bring her a pint or two of frozen yogurt later.”

“Well, May and Coulson were going to have to go undercover and break into a corporation's evil lair, but I think your idea's much better,” Skye said cheerfully. “Although I did get to drive the getaway car in the other plan.”

“I was not going to let you near a steering wheel,” Trip muttered. “Jemma told me about your speeding tickets. How do you go over ninety in a van?”

“And there goes any kind of plausible deniability,” Hill sighed. 

“You'll want to take one of us along with you,” Melinda May (SHIELD legend number three) said calmly. “Just in case you have any questions and so someone can stay in contact with the rest of the team. I suggest Simmons.”

“I'm not...I failed my field examination. And neither of the times I went undercover went particularly well,” Simmons whispered, pulling her knees up to her chest in her corner of the couch. Skye leaned across from her end to rest a reassuring hand on Simmons' knee and Fitz couldn't help wondering what exactly had happened. He remembered that she hadn't done very well when they'd had their field training unit at the Academy, but then neither had he. It had been the one time when they'd competed to see who could do less poorly than the other. He'd won, by a very slim margin.

“You're learning,” May replied. “You did well, at Providence, when you found the body. And you're the only one on the team with the background to use one of those holographic interfaces Stark is too fond of.”

“We trained on them at Sci-Tech. The Stark ones are bound to be a little different, but I can probably figure them out,” she said slowly, tilting her head back against the couch cushions. “How are you going to get me past the security at Stark?”

“I'll just say we're on a date or something,” Fitz shrugged. “That I'm trying to impress you with my fancy gadgets. They'll believe that.”

“I'm not going to pretend to be your girlfriend!” Simmons huffed and dropped her feet back down to the floor with a thump. Fitz smiled to himself: arguing with him had always gotten her back on track. Sometimes at the Academy, when she'd seemed sad or tired or just a little off, he'd provoked her on purpose to see the fire come back into her eyes.

“I didn't say that you were going to be my girlfriend. Just that we could pretend to be on a date. I'll even buy you lunch afterward, just to be nice.” There was a great deli near Stark, with sandwiches bigger than his face and giant dill pickles that were just sour enough. “Then you can dump me in the humiliating fashion of your choice immediately afterward.”

“Can't I be your sister or something?” she protested. “I think we could have a very brother-sister relationship, couldn't we? Siblings argue all the time, after all.”

“Because you can fake such a convincing Scottish accent? Look, it's only for a few hours, Simmons. You just have to look impressed at the size of my equipment and then--” He stopped, winced. “I didn't mean it like that. Look, it was just an idea. And if you can come up with anything better, I'll gladly listen to it.”

As it turned out, she didn't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is still a WIP, so I don't have an exact posting schedule but the next chapter should be up on Friday.
> 
> Chapter title from "You Never Give Me Your Money" by the Beatles.


	3. I'm having trouble with my do's and my don't's

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "you've got something" by the Jungle Giants.

The next morning, Jemma sailed through Stark Industries security with a sunny smile, a hidden earpiece, and one hastily assembled date outfit courtesy of the nearest H&M and Skye. (“You don't wear a sweater set on a fake date, Jemma.) “Jemma's a biochemist,” Fitz explained breezily to the guard. “I'm just taking her up to show off a few things before we head out for lunch. She's not easily impressed, this one.”

“And you said Pepper's already cleared her?” the guard asked.

“Pepper was how we met,” Fitz said and looped an arm around her waist to pull her into him, smiling down at her in a way that looked surprisingly real. “I'm a lucky man.”

“You bet you are,” Jemma said sweetly and elbowed him in the side when no one was looking. 

“You have abnormally sharp elbows.” Fitz complained later in the elevator, rubbing at his side. “What did you do that for?”

“Waist-holding wasn't part of the plan,” she hissed. “None of my other boyfriends were that touchy.” Never mind that she'd only had two and never mind that his arm around her waist and hand resting reassuringly against her spine had felt warm and secure and better than it had any right to be, because she should be enough to make herself feel safe and introducing anyone else into the equation was an unwanted variable.

“I'm sorry!” Fitz grumbled. “I thought it'd make us look more convincing—I did some research on couple behavior, based on a statistical sample from the city, and the arm around waist maneuver actually looked fairly standard.”

“Well, don't do anything without asking me again,” she hissed. “And hold my hand now. We're about to get out.” Fitz sighed, muttered something under his breath that sounded like _why me_ , and took her hand in his. His hand was dry (maybe she'd buy him some moisturizer as a thank you present) and warm (honestly, was the man a human furnace?) and didn't feel nearly as unpleasant holding hers as she'd hoped it would.

“We've got ten minutes or so, Simmons” he whispered as they walked down the hallway. “Skye's going to tamper with the security footage so it looks like I'm showing you something completely boring on the holo, right?”

“She's very excited. I think she's already been pulling images of some generic Stark robot that looks like the one from Star Wars,” Jemma said dryly. “And you should probably start calling me Jemma, since we're supposed to be on a date. Even if you'd rather be on it with Skye than me.”

“Sorry?” Fitz blinked owlishly at her.

“You like her,” she explained patiently. “You kept on looking over at her last night. I have to warn you, it's probably futile. The last guy she liked turned out to be HYDRA and it was more than a little awkward.”

“No, I don't. I wasn't even looking at her.”

“So you just stare at your couch on a regular basis?” she asked. He'd kept on glancing over at the couch she and Skye were sitting on last night and his eyes had clearly lingered longer on Skye than they had on her.

“Never mind. We're almost there,” Fitz said as they approached the end of the hallway, pausing in front of his door and letting the full-body scanners click into effect. “Leo Fitz, Head of Tech Department, Level Seven. And guest—please see guest badge for identification.” The scanners beeped in approval and his office door swung open. They'd added yet another layer of security since her last visit, apparently. “Right then. This needs two people to work it. Stand over there.” Fitz pointed to the opposite side of his office. “And sketch out the molecular structure of carbon with your right hand.”

“I know the initiation sequence. SHIELD has these too, you know,” she told him and raised one hand to start tracing the sequence.

“Yeah, but ours are better,” he shrugged and sketched out his half of the sequence. A glowing matrix sprung up between them, stretching across his office and then doubling back on itself ten times over, and Jemma just barely kept her jaw from dropping. As much as she hated to admit it, he was right. “So, Agent Simm—Jemma, want to find out if we're drift-compatible?”

And as it turned out, they were. In the extreme. She didn't even have to say anything else before they dove into the holo's database at the exact same moment or ask him where to start. Somehow, without him saying another word to her, she already knew. Their hands moved in perfect synchronization as they flipped through holographic file after holographic file, pinching and stretching and sorting through streams of data until he spotted the database of SHIELD's Stark-designed planes and sent it flying over to her. It took her less than a minute for her to spot the Bus and send it back over to him, and even less for him to find the plane's hidden tracker. They tossed a real-time map back and forth, one of them for each hemisphere, and spotted where it was headed at the exact same moment. Fitz sketched out the rest of the plane's flight path with one finger, tracing a long red line towards Cuba, as Jemma quietly relayed the information to the team over her headpiece. They'd been moving closer and closer as they narrowed down their data, until they were standing a foot or two away from each other and Jemma didn't notice it until they were nearly done. She supposed that her brain had decided to include him in her personal space bubble without consulting her first. She met his eyes while she talked, glowing with excitement, and grinned hugely at him. That had been...rather spectacular, actually. She'd had a few serviceable partners at Sci-Tech, but she'd never worked with anyone else quite like that. And they were still staring at each other and for once, she didn't feel the need to argue with him and it was strange in the nicest way.

“Mr. Fitz,” A calm robotic voice interrupted. “You asked me to inform you if Miss Potts chose to pay you a visit. At this moment, she is about two and a half minutes away.”

“Shit,” Fitz breathed and hit a button on his desk. The matrix vanished instantly. “Come over here and look like you're inspecting one of my prototypes. I've got to have a fairly harmless one somewhere, though I don't really know where everything is and Pepper keeps on telling me that I need to get a new filing system and I really didn't prepare for this and _Jemma, please stop rolling your eyes at me and do something!_ ”

Jemma did. She lunged forward and kissed him. He was unprepared.

They went reeling back against his desk, his hands hovering awkwardly at his sides and hers holding on to his shirt for dear life as she stumbled against him, and for the first moment of their kiss, he was evidently too startled to even consider kissing her back. His mouth was already open in a surprised gasp and his hands were still doing the flailing thing but his lips were warm and soft and she could probably ( _definitely_ ) work with this. Then Jemma deepened the kiss, carefully stroking her tongue into his mouth, and slid one hand around to the back of his neck to tug lightly on the curls there and it was like a switch flipped inside his brain. His hands went to her waist, to turn her and lift her up onto his desk with surprising ease so she could wrap her legs around his hips and press herself close enough to him to feel his heart pounding through his shirt. “I'm going to fall off,” she mumbled when they finally broke their kiss and he turned his attention to pressing kisses along her jaw and down her neck.

“No, you're not. I've got you,” he said and nipped slightly at her pulse. Jemma felt a shiver run down her spine and tugged on his tie to bring him up to kiss her again. “I'm an engineer, I know about these things.”

“Well, I don't want to be found out just because you've misjudged the angle of your desk,” she hissed when his mouth was an inch away from hers. “You'd better just kiss me again and make it convincing.”

“I was making it very convin--” As it turned out, there was only one truly effective way to make Leo Fitz shut up: kissing him. She'd have to calculate its success rate later, when she wasn't quite so...preoccupied.

“I see my introduction went better than expected,” someone said from the doorway and they sprang apart almost instantly. Somehow, when Jemma had imagined meeting Pepper Potts, CEO, philanthropist, and style icon, she hadn't considered the possibility of being caught kissing her academic nemesis on a desk for the sake of their undercover story. In fact, she'd prepared for at least ten different eventualities, ranging from the professional to the catastrophic, for meeting each and every one of her role models but this one had never occurred to her. She comforted herself with the fact that at least it wasn't Doctor Jane Foster. “Jake mentioned that you had a date,” Pepper added. “And I have to say that I'm very pleasantly surprised. After the last date I sent you on, I was beginning to worry.”

“It wasn't my fault that her cousin's best friend's stepdaughter had an urgent emergency halfway through the appetizers.” Fitz shrugged. “Jemma and I have been getting on much better. Even when we're arguing.”

“Someone needs to stop you from building robots,” Jemma said with a teasing smile and hoped that it sounded convincing. Fitz seemed like the robot-building type. At the Academy, he'd always been working on something meant to clean his room or make pancakes or take over the world, pockets stuffed full of mechanical parts and fingers stained with machine grease. 

“And that's why I like you so much.” Fitz lightly kissed her on the cheek and Jemma tried very hard not to blush. “Should we head out to lunch now?”

“Fitz, you're not taking her to the deli, are you?” When he sheepishly nodded, Pepper fixed him with a _look_. “Take Jemma somewhere she can sit down and buy her dessert afterward. There's a place on 17th that does soft serve with fruit blended in.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Fitz mock-saluted, making Pepper laugh, and grabbed Jemma's hand to pull her out of the door so quickly that her heels nearly caught on the edge of his rug. “I promise you a lunch of the highest quality, Jemma, and I'll provide photographic evidence afterward!”

“How did she know my name?” Jemma whispered as they hurried down the hallway.

“Pepper knows everything,” Fitz said matter-of-factly. “Do you like Thai food, salad bars, or fancy grilled cheeses best?”

“We can't have lunch.” Jemma stopped in the middle of the hallway to gape at him. “The team has to know where that plane's headed and then we have to go after Garrett and Ward and stop them and...you can't have lunch in the middle of a mission!”

“You already told Skye where the plane's headed, didn't you?” he asked and pulled her along after him. Jemma sighed and nodded. “They're probably planning and arming themselves and whatever secret agents do and they'll come pick you up when they're ready, won't they?”

“It's not like I'm a child at preschool and May's going to pull up in her minivan to pick me up and give me a juice box, but yes. Sort of. I was going to get a cab and meet them at the commuter airport,” Jemma tried to explain. “Or Skye was going to get me. But we vetoed that one after Coulson saw the speeding tickets.”

“Perfect. A Stark car will get you there after lunch. Because food is an important part of any secret mission,” Fitz told her. “ And because Pepper will have my head if I don't have proof that we went out to lunch after you kissed me like that.”

“You kissed me like _that_ , too,” she muttered.

“Yes, but you started it.” He actually grinned at her then and Jemma couldn't decide whether she wanted to argue with him about it some more or kiss him like that again in the elevator and see what he did. She would pick argue, of course. Probably. Possibly. Wouldn't she?

Fitz bought her a grilled cheese with fig and honey jam and an enormous amount of soft serve that he kept on stealing bites of when she wasn't looking, and listened intently without interrupting her once when she talked about the latest compound she was trying to develop in her spare time, and made her laugh and smile, and slipped his hand through hers when they walked down the street. He was perfectly, suspiciously nice all afternoon and when she asked him why, he told her solemnly that he was keeping up their cover. Jemma ignored the flutter in her stomach that said the cover had nothing to do with it.

When she was about to climb into the Stark car that would take her to the airfield, she turned back to wave goodbye to him and he rushed forward instead to kiss her right at the corner of her mouth and press something into her hand. “Good luck, Jemma,” he blurted out. “Be, ah, be careful, won't you? Stay safe.”

The sandwich was prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella, with just a hint of homemade pesto aioli.


	4. if dying young won't change your mind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from "Diane Young" by Vampire Weekend

Jemma was thinking about the third law of thermodynamics. It wasn't as comforting as she hoped it'd be. Few things were when you were trapped on the bottom of the ocean.

She pressed her head against the side of the pod, staring out at the ocean, and tried to think. There had to be some kind of emergency beacon she could activate and then...and then what? They'd be looking for her in the middle of the Caribbean? They were looking for her, Jemma reassured herself, and they'd find her. And if they didn't, she'd just find her way out herself because she refused to die this way. Because there were so many things left to discover and places left to see and people left to kiss and—no endings. Not yet.

She glanced at the glass again and it hit her. Bulletproof glass—if she could blow it out somehow, maybe she could get out and swim to the top. But how was she supposed to break it? _Think like an engineer, Jemma. They blow things up all the time._ She glanced around the pod, surveying what she had there. First-aid supplies: bandages, antiseptic ointment, splints, oxygen mask, defibrillator. Defibrillator! _I imploded a window with one of those once_ , a voice that sounded like Fitz said. _Terrified my jerk of a roommate._

Right then. One breath, ninety feet of water, and a sliver of hope. Jemma blew the glass.

 

“Just let me see her.” Fitz had been pacing in this waiting room for a day and a half now and he had no intention of stopping anytime soon. “You can search me for weapons or contraband sandwiches or whatever—my intentions are pure, I swear. I just want to make sure she's okay.”

“We all want to see her. But a certain group of control freaks--” Skye raised her voice loud enough to carry through the glass and on the other side, Fitz was fairly sure that he saw a nurse wince. “Told us that we couldn't go in and see her yet, because she needs time to recover. Though I'm not sure how she's supposed to recover,” Skye raised her voice again. “When they're running tests on her all the time.”

“They know what they're doing, Skye,” Trip said gently. “They said they'd let us in as soon as we could and then you can give Jemma all the tabloids you've been saving up for her.”

“Jemma reads tabloids?” Fitz asked, puzzled.

“She...it's what she brought me after I got shot,” Skye explained. “She probably wants some weird science journals too, but we also have a whole season of people trying to find love on national television to catch up on. Another thing to blame HYDRA for.”

“Ah...well, I brought the weird science journals so I guess we've covered all our bases.” Fitz hefted the stack of science journals he'd brought along with him as proof. He hadn't known which ones she read, so he'd just gone for all the notable ones.

“How did you find out what happened? It's good to see you again, my man.” Trip added. “But the Director's been pretty big on secrecy lately.”

“There was a project of mine that Jemma promised to look over once she got back. Only I never hear from her. And I thought that if she'd missed the chance to tell me that I'd mucked it all up, something must really be wrong. So I bothered Pepper, who bothered Natasha, who bothered Nick Fury—nice finding out that he was alive, by the way, does anyone ever stay dead around here? And then I guess I'd bothered enough important people to get the okay to come here.” Maybe bothering hadn't quite been the right word for it. Really, it'd been more like a full-blown panic. He'd always...he'd just been worried and he'd wanted to make sure she was okay.

“So you and Jemma must have been pretty close back at the Academy,” Trip said. “Dropping everything and flying out here to come check on her when you heard?”

“Not really, actually. I...I never really knew what to say to her, so I spent most of my time trying to impress her by showing her up. Not the best strategy, but I was seventeen. And then we were bitter rivals for the entire time at the Academy—she nearly threw a drink at me once when we were arguing about a finer point of quantum physics,” Fitz said cheerfully. “It was bright blue.”

“Right.” Skye and Trip exchanged a look that was clearly meant to be deeply significant. Fitz ignored it: his relationship with Jemma really wasn't that odd. He just enjoyed arguing with her more than he enjoyed agreeing with anyone else.

Case in point: the minute that she woke up and saw him waiting by her bedside, she started lecturing him on his choice of scientific journals. “I can't believe that you forgot the astronomy journals,” she said, leaning forward from her mountain of pillows to inspect his offerings. “What if Doctor Jane Foster made a new breakthrough and I missed it?”

“If Doctor Jane Foster made a new breakthrough, everyone from here to Timbuktu would have been talking about it, considering,” he replied from where he was perched on the end of her bed.

“Considering what?”

“The whole proving the existence of ancient Norse gods thing. Are you really supposed to eat that?” He peered over at the lunch tray beside her bed. “Even Jello doesn't look that green.”

“Technically, the Asgardians were worshiped as gods by the Norse. That doesn't mean they were gods, simply beings with impressive powers and longer lifespans than ours. Worship alone does not a god make,” Jemma said crisply. “For instance, I seem to remember you worshiping at the altar of bacon when we were at the Academy, but calling bacon a god would simply be a logical fallacy.”

“But,” Fitz held up one finger triumphantly. “Have you ever had the eggs Benedict with bacon at this breakfast place in Brooklyn? It's Steve Rogers' favorite.”

“Fitz, I spent the past ten years in a lab and then on a plane—when would I have had the time to get breakfast in Brooklyn?” Jemma asked impatiently.

“Well, maybe you should have made time. Not just for breakfast, but for other things,” he blurted out and hoped that she'd understand without him having to say anything else.

“You don't get to take a vacation when you're a SHIELD agent,” she said and sat up against the pillows, a new spark in her eye and a flush spreading across her cheeks. “Time off doesn't exactly go hand in hand with saving the world. I suppose that maybe if you're in private industry, you have time for that kind of thing.”

“I'll have you know that at least two of my patents have been for charity. The portable desalination device I designed has already been put into use on half the Pacific Coast and...” They argued for the next thirty minutes until Skye barged in with a stack of magazines and DVDs, unceremoniously shoved him off the bed, and asked him how the robots were doing without him. Fitz didn't even have time to explain that his work was a great deal more complicated than maintaining robots (and his robots were all controlled by a key that he had with him at all times, anyway) before he was booted out and left to hang out with Trip. 

“They're talking about you, you know,” the other man informed him. “Want a tour of the base? One of the Koenigs—I don't know which one, they just keep popping out of the ground like daisies—already gave you a lanyard.”

“Could I get a look at the cloaking on that Bus of yours?” Fitz asked.

“Sure thing. I know that Mack's been trying to get it to work again for ages. Careful,” Trip said over his shoulder, already leading the way deeper into the base. “Or the Director might kidnap you and keep you around. Though I don't think Simmons would mind.”

 

It had been nearly a week since she'd been cleared by the SHIELD doctors and Fitz was _still there_. Jemma had wondered if he was doing it just to irritate her, but she'd barely seen him for the past few days—he was testing some kind of body armor prototype on Trip and they'd been spending every waking hour out on the obstacle course putting it through his paces. _Boys_ , Jemma thought. If he'd really shown up to make sure she was okay, shouldn't he want to spend more time around her making sure that she didn't trip over the loose extension cords he left everywhere or eat any more of that awful green Jello? Not that she wasn't capable of avoiding extension cords herself, because she was an agent of SHIELD and she'd swum her way up from the bottom of the ocean and fought HYDRA agents and...anyway, the point was that she was puzzled as to what exactly he was doing at the Playground. And there was nothing that Jemma Simmons liked less than a puzzle she couldn't solve.

So she identified the one location where he was bound to make an appearance (the kitchen) and lay in wait. He was making a massive sandwich when she sprang her trap and he nearly dropped the jar of pickles when she appeared from the pantry and cornered him against one of the counters, bracing her hands on either side of him and trying to look intimidating. It didn't exactly help that he was taller but Jemma scowled up at him anyway. “Why are you still here?” she demanded. “Don't they need you to blow things up at Stark?”

“I'm consulting on a temporary basis. Coulson thinks that I'm very valuable,” he said smugly.

“Well then, when are you leaving?” This position was really bringing her dangerously close to him but his eyes had gone wide and dark and his breathing was shallower than usual, so presumably he was intimidated.

“Do you want me to leave?” For a moment, he looked hurt.

“No! You, ah...you never showed me your project and you said you would. It actually sounded rather clever when you told me about it. Not _extremely_ clever,” she added quickly. Secretly, she'd been rather looking forward to the chance to work with him again. “Just rather clever.”

“So you think I'm rather clever?” he was grinning now, wide and bright and infuriating. It made Jemma's blood race through her veins and her entire body flush with something that she firmly told herself was irritation.

“I didn't say that you were clever, just that your project was,” she countered.

“No, you do. You think I'm clever,” he said and leaned in closer until they were practically nose to nose. “And you can't stand the fact that you think it.” 

“I'm cleverer,” she whispered.

“Not a real word,” Fitz retorted and looked even smugger. Well. Jemma had always known that Leo Fitz would make her snap one day. She'd just imagined something more like hurling moderately dangerous objects and a few well-chosen insults at him from a safe distance. Grabbing him by his ridiculous tie, pressing her entire body against his, and kissing him until he couldn't say another word hadn't ever exactly been a likely scenario. But somehow here she was. And Fitz didn't seem to be objecting to it at all. 

By the time they realized that the kitchen wasn't the most ideal location, he had undone the top three buttons of her blouse, she had sucked two marks into existence on his neck, and they'd wound themselves so closely around each other that his pulse seemed synchronized with hers. “We can go to my bunk,” Jemma whispered against his mouth and felt him groan in response.

Half of Jemma's brain was telling her that this was a very bad idea: you didn't just sleep with your sort-of nemesis and expect to go back to cheerfully arguing the next morning like everything was the same. But the other half of her brain was busy noting how his hands made every nerve ending in her skin come awake even when they were just skimming along her collarbone and the single-minded focus with which he kissed her and his small sighs whenever she found a particularly sensitive spot on his neck. It had been so very long and he seemed so very talented and no one had ever made the calculations in her brain shut down like this before and...screw it. Just for one night, she wanted to feel the kind of warmth that the ocean had seeped out of her, have the world snap back into focus and have the same spark light underneath her skin that she felt whenever she got within three feet of him. Jemma grabbed him by the hand and dragged him down the hallway to her bunk, stumbling as she stopped to kiss him again and again.

“Jemma, are you...I mean, are you sure?” he asked when she flipped the lock on her door and turned to him. “You just...and we...I mean, I haven't even bought you dinner yet.”

“Absolutely,” she breathed. “Now kiss me again and take off your shirt. Not at the same time.”


	5. if I didn't know better

“He’s just so wrong. About everything.” Jemma frowned intently into her coffee. “And no one appears to be telling him that and it’s a problem, Skye!” That had been all she was trying to do, really: explain to Doctor Leopold Fitz the myriad of ways in which he was wrong and how he had absolutely no chance of ever being right. She had absolutely no idea– _none_ –how her honorable intentions had led to him currently being asleep in her bedroom, wearing nothing but a sheet. 

“So when you're moaning his name, you're really telling him how wrong he is?” Skye said with a smirk and snagged another piece of toast as it popped up. They'd been having early morning breakfasts together ever since Skye had started dragging herself up at the crack of dawn in order to train. She'd stumbled into the kitchen moaning about coffee like a zombie and Jemma had already been there, sipping a cup of tea and smiling brightly.

“This coming from the girl who made out with Trip in the training room yesterday,” Jemma teased, laughing fondly when Skye's mouth nearly dropped open. 

“How did you know about it? I wiped all the footage. Jemma Simmons,” Skye said, narrowing her eyes at her and leaning forward. “Have you been teaching yourself to hack?”

“Actually, I didn't know for sure until you reacted like that. Lucky guess.” Jemma took a triumphant sip of tea as Skye let out a long, low whistle of respect. “Based on scientific observation and a well-founded hypothesis, of course.”

“Ugh, you sound just like Fitz—evidence this, hypothesis that. No wonder you banged him six ways from Sunday.”

“Skye!” Jemma shrieked, then lowered her voice before she woke up half the base. “I did not bang him six ways from Sunday. Three ways, at the most.”

“You know, after jumping out of a plane, throwing yourself on a dendrotoxin grenade, surviving the collapse of SHIELD, and being trapped in a box at the bottom of the ocean, most agents would be begging for a vacation,” Maria Hill, Nick Fury's former second-in-command and number five on Jemma's list of most admired women living today, said dryly. “Especially a paid one.”

“But I don't need a vacation. I'm perfectly fine,” Jemma insisted. “I already told you that the doctors cleared me.”

“They cleared you physically, not psychologically, Simmons. You can even do some research at Stark if you'd like—I know that Pepper would love to have you. We're not asking you to go lounge around on a tropical beach somewhere with a drink in your hand, though I'd do that in a heartbeat if Congress would stop calling me in,” Hill added with a sigh. “We just think it'd be a good idea for you to take a break from SHIELD for a little while.”

“You don't get to take breaks from SHIELD. I haven't had one in ten years and I don't want one,” Jemma said stubbornly. What she really needed was science, the comforting weight of a test tube in one hand and a clipboard in the other, the familiar lines of her goggles around her eyes and the feel of her lab coat sliding over her shoulders, experiments and double blinds and neatly lined graphs. If she went back in her lab, she'd feel like herself again in no time at all. Or any lab at all, considering that her lab on the Bus didn't really exist anymore. “Just give me something to do and I'll forget all about everything else.”

“You know, I used to think that too. Until I realized that forgetting wasn't the healthy thing to do,” Hill sighed again and Jemma remembered that she'd seen the Battle of New York firsthand. “Look, May came and talked to me. She's worried about you and none of us want a worried Melinda May peering over our shoulders. So think of it as you doing your team—and Stark Industries—a favor if that makes it any easier.”

“Fitz did mention a project that he wanted me to consult on,” Jemma said slowly. It'd still be science, wouldn't it? And she could stay at Stark for a week or two, show Fitz what was what, and then come right back to the base, claiming to be rested and relaxed and ready to face whatever came next. They'd have forgotten all about her being--well, whatever they thought she was that warranted a vacation—by then and she'd get to go back to the team like nothing had happened. SHIELD had been her life since she was seventeen, after all, and she couldn't even imagine what her life would be like if it didn't revolve around a secret organization that protected people from things they weren't supposed to know about and now did. Rather boring, she supposed. “I wouldn't be gone long, would I?”

“You'd be gone for however long you wanted to be. I've been talking to Pepper and she'll sort everything out for you at Stark—she's thrilled at the idea of getting to take someone who isn't Fitz apartment hunting. I'll be there too, once Congress finishes with me. Just took a job as head of Stark security,” Hill explained. “Protecting Tony from the hundreds and hundreds of people who are pissed off at him on a regular basis.”

“I'm not—I won't need an apartment,” Jemma blurted out. “I can just stay in Fitz's spare room, since I won't be there for very long anyway. Just as long as he needs me to work on his prototype.”

“Just the spare room? Pepper will take his favorite robots away if she finds out that he didn't even try to offer you his bedroom. Although,” Hill added with a small, smug smile. “From what I've been hearing, that's not a problem?”  
Jemma groaned, put her head down against the desk, and wondered if Skye had told everyone on the base about her and Fitz. Honestly, it had only been meant to be one night. Which had somehow turned into three, because there was this thing he did with his hands and his tongue at the same time which really...anyway, it had been highly satisfactory for both parties. And probably meant she could talk him into pranking Skye in retaliation. 

“You know, Agent Simmons, I can't really see your face but it's good to see you smile anyway.”

 

“So here's the thing,” Fitz said a week later, nervously shifting from foot to foot. “I don't actually have a spare room. Or rather, that is, I used to have a spare room. There was one when I first bought the flat—it had its own bathroom and everything. Nice pressure shower. The shower's still there, actually,” he added unnecessarily. “But I, ah, I never really had anyone come over to stay so I converted it into a home library about five years ago. Which I tried to tell you a few nights ago but you weren't listening.”

“Of course I was listening!” Jemma said defensively. “I always listen to you. Sometimes.”

“You weren't listening. You were trying to teach me how to tie a half Windsor although I told you several times that I already knew how. I think it wasn't helped by the fact that the tie was all I was wearing and there were many more interesting things we could have been doing than tying a half Windsor,” he said grumpily. She'd gone off on a long tangent about the way he had dressed at the Academy, all wrinkled t-shirts and jeans with holes in the pockets, and then he'd pointed out that Pepper had whipped him into shape with a series of non-optional shopping trips the first week he'd started at Stark. Jemma, being Jemma, had promptly challenged him about it and gone off on a completely pointless tangent about the state of his ties that had kept them both awake until two in the morning.

“And I would have taught you if you hadn't kept on distracting me.”

“I already told you that I--” Fitz stopped, redirected himself. She was giving him one of those tempting little smiles that meant she was very pleased with herself for winding him up and about to be even more pleased with herself in a moment when one of them snapped and went to their usual argument-ending method. “Anyway, I don't have a spare room, but you can stay in mine until Pepper finds you an apartment. I'll sleep on the couch.”

“Fitz, don't be ridiculous,” Jemma said, almost fondly, and rolled her eyes at him. “That bed's big enough to fit five people inside and I've already made all kinds of lovely plans for it that require your presence.” She leaned up to kiss him, looping her arms around his neck and pressing her lips to his like she'd never doubted that he'd kiss her back, but her hands trembled just a little against the back of her neck and Fitz realized with a sudden shock that Jemma Simmons wasn't nearly as sure of everything as she seemed. It made his heart surge with a sudden, inexplicable (not at all inexplicable, really, if he admitted it to himself) affection for her and so, although he had about six fantastic retorts prepared, he just kissed her back and wrapped his arms tightly around her as if he could keep her there just by holding her.

Later that night, long after she'd fallen asleep and wrapped herself around him, Fitz stared down at her, tried to think logically about the way she made him feel, and realized that there was absolutely nothing logical about it. She drew him into her orbit like a moon around its bright shining planet, his thoughts and words and body all tipping towards her until they were talking and kissing at the same time and until he wondered if his mind had only been a half until it met hers. She made his heart clench in his chest and his pulse thrum in his veins and his world twist itself into different shapes around her, made him want to be smarter and better and stronger and somehow _worthy_ of her and wonder if maybe, somehow, he already was. She made him ache and dream and want, sharp words from a soft mouth, and Fitz supposed that it had to be the most illogical thing of all.

And once he realized that, he realized that all he really wanted was for her to stay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for my irregular posting schedule with this one--things have been a little crazy for me this week, and this fic just kept on being longer than I thought it would be... The next and final chapter will be up on Monday!


	6. i belong with you, you belong with me (you're my sweetheart)

Jemma only meant to stay there for a week or two, not for a month or two, and if you asked her, it was all Fitz's fault. He kept on taking her interesting places and she kept on staying around for the promise of something she hadn't seen yet. First, he took her to his office at Stark and guided her around all the departments they'd bickered in before. They still bickered this time around, but with other people too. Jemma haunted the Stark labs, peering at prototypes and frowning whenever she saw a titration performed at less than her vigorous standards, and eventually she wore the lab techs down enough that they let her lurk around and happily test a variety of noxious substances. She would have stayed in there for days if Fitz hadn't dragged her out with the promise of lunches paid for with his ever-handy Stark Industries credit card (“as a consultant, we have to give you the very best treatment, Agent Simmons) and exciting new projects in Stark's other departments. To his credit, they were exciting, some of them so exciting that she had to sign a whole new set of confidentiality agreements. And when she wasn't glued to a lab bench, she was holed up in Fitz's office, working on the new weapon they were definitely not going to call the night-night gun.

“I think it's clever,” he sulked. “I had the idea first, anyway.”

“No one will take us seriously if we call it that,” she protested and folded her arms across her chest. “And you may have had the idea first, but I was the one who came up with the idea of using the dendrotoxin as the stunning agent. You'd just be wandering about muttering to yourself like a mad scientist if I hadn't come along.”

“I thought you were the mad scientist,” Fitz said with a grin and took a step towards her. Jemma huffed in exasperation. He'd been doing this a lot lately, turning from exasperated to sweet in a moment and just smiling at her fondly and kissing her whenever she said something deliberately infuriating. Jemma wasn't sure if it was sweet or a tactic meant to infuriate her even more. She comforted herself with the fact that if it was the latter, it was failing miserably: she couldn't stay mad at him for nearly as long as she used to.

Especially when he locked the door to his office, pulled down the shades, hoisted her on top of his desk, and did indecent things to her for the next hour and a half.

 

Theoretically, Jemma had an apartment of her own for her time at Stark. A very nice one, with bay windows and a almost functional fireplace and a queen-size bed. And sometimes she used that apartment, when Fitz came over. (Well, mostly the bed part of it.) But his apartment had a home library and was a five-minute walk away from an entire neighborhood of restaurants—they'd both been banned from cooking anything more complicated than pasta by the local fire department. And so most nights, she ended up over at his apartment, eating takeout sprawled out across his living room floor or seated across from him at a restaurant while they tossed ideas back and forth and occasionally held hands under the table. And once she was there, it was so much easier to sleep over, to let him wrap his arms around her and keep her warm all through the night.

She had a drawer stuffed full of clothing there too, for the days when Fitz announced that they were skiving off work and exploring “the greatest city on Earth”. He took her to museum after museum, from the Met where she stared at the Temple of Dendur for a full fifteen minutes to the Transit Museum where he rattled off facts about the design of streetcars. They went to aggressively hip cafes in Brooklyn and delis in Manhattan with even more aggressively grumpy waiters and food markets where she made him try foods he couldn't pronounce and laughed when he made faces at her. They browsed the stacks at the Strand and had enormous picnics in the park while Fitz sketched designs for a more aerodynamic Frisbee and drove all the way up to Niagara Falls one weekend to take madly grinning selfies in front of the falls, his arm wrapped tightly around her shoulders. One weekend, he even talked Pepper into letting her come along to LA on a Stark business trip and after he was done with the obligatory round of meetings, they went to the beach, armed with tubes of 90 SPF and massive paperback novels, and ate falling-apart fish tacos on the Santa Monica Pier. And when he booked them a later flight so they could spend the day at Disneyland and watched Jemma get way too excited about cartoon characters, she couldn't help feeling an absurd wave of warmth radiating out from her stomach and through her entire body every time she caught sight of him. 

“So you're dating,” Skye said on one of their video calls, after Jemma had gotten back from LA with half a tan and a head full of confusion.

“No. Yes. Maybe. We've never actually said anything about it. I mean, we barely even talked about it when we started sleeping together.” Jemma paused, frowned. “That sounds weird, doesn't it? Like we just ripped each other's clothes off in complete silence? Because we didn't.”

“Jemma, I used to sleep next door to you. I know you didn't,” Skye said and rolled her eyes at her.

“Sorry about that,” Jemma winced. “But I mean, I don't know. We've never really discussed it or put a label on it or—we're just us. And it's nice and we work and it's nothing serious. I'm coming back soon anyway.”

“Really? We miss you. Even May does—I mean, she hasn't said anything about it because conversation isn't really her thing but she did mention adding another member to our morning tai-chi group and I'm pretty sure she likes you better than Trip. By a very slim margin,” Skye added as Trip came into the kitchen, slinging an arm around Skye's shoulders and leaning down to kiss her cheek before heading over to pull the blender out from the kitchen island. “Because Trip does have awesome arms and a sparkling personality and he totally told me to say that.”

“I did not,” Trip called from the counter, where he was making something in the blender that looked green, grainy, very healthy, and probably disgusting. “My awesome arms can speak for themselves.” He carried his shake back over to the couch beside Skye, who gave him a meaningful stare until he sighed, got back up, and brought her the bag of barbecue potato chips, and waved cheerfully into the camera at Jemma. “So when are you coming back, girl? The science's division pretty hopeless without you around. And Skye's already talked me into at least ten different Bond movies, so you need to come back and watch The Breakfast Club with me already.”

“I still think this is weird, by the way. Before you, I didn't know any straight guys who liked Clueless,” Skye told him.

“When I was growing up, I spent most of my time with my cousin Sharon. We would have spent all our time watching movies with explosions if my mom hadn't brought out her collection of movies from the 80's,” Trip explained. 

Jemma just laughed and let the familiar sound of her friends' voices wash over her, promising herself that it wouldn't be much longer until she got to hear their voices for real. She'd always meant to go back, after all, and she would have been back already if she hadn't gotten...distracted. SHIELD needed her and she needed it right back. When she'd first been recruited for the Academy at seventeen, SHIELD had promised her a whole world's worth of answers and a purpose, the chance to help more people than she ever could have on her own, to be more than she ever could have been as just Jemma Simmons. And even if it had all come tumbling down with the Triskellion, it was still where she belonged. (Wasn't it?) She was an agent of SHIELD and agents didn't take vacations or get involved with civilians, no matter how brilliant or kind or brave. It was dangerous on both sides, making a target of the civilian and giving the agent another weakness in a time when they couldn't afford to have any. She remembered Coulson and his cellist, the way he'd stared at her across a dark auditorium and everything they'd risked to stop just one of the many prisoners from the Fridge. She'd leave as soon as she could, Jemma decided, before things got more complicated than they already were.

So that night at dinner, after she'd mentioned her call with Skye and Trip and Fitz had pouted at her for not asking Trip questions about the latest prototype of the body armor he'd sent the other man, she told him that she could bring his notes along with her when she went back to SHIELD. Fitz went very still, the only sound the clatter of his fork against his plate as he dropped it.

“You're, er, you're leaving so soon? Did I do something wrong?” he blurted out, then immediately dropped his eyes back down to his plate. “I mean...I apologize if anyone at Stark hasn't made you feel welcome.”

“No, I've had a wonderful time here. With you,” she added before she could think better of it. “It's just that they need me back at the Playground. I should have left ages ago, but we were still working on the night-night gun and I...you should be able to finish the last modifications on it without me?”

“Right,” Fitz mumbled. “We'll all miss you. Especially Pepper—she was looking forward to introducing you to Jane and Darcy when they came to visit next month. Maybe you could stay just a little longer?” he asked hopefully. “Please stay, Jemma.”

“I really can't. This,” she gestured vaguely between the two of them. “This has already gone far enough. I've probably broken all kinds of SHIELD rules already.”

“I'm not asking you to stay for me. Not really. I'm asking you to stay for you. You've already nearly died twice for SHIELD, Jemma—isn't that enough? You don't have to give them the chance to rip you apart a third time.”

“I understood when I joined that it was dangerous. Every SHIELD agent understands that,” she snapped. “And I'm fine. I keep on telling everyone that I'm fine, but they don't believe me.”

“Why would they, when you have dreams that you wake up screaming from? SHIELD will take your entire life if you let them and then expect you to thank them for it. Why do you think I took Stark's offer after I graduated from the Academy?” Fitz said. “I wanted my life to be my own—don't you want that too?”

“It doesn't matter what I want.” Jemma sighed exasperatedly and stabbed a mushroom with her fork. “What matters is the commitment I made and that I'm going to keep. I swore an oath, Fitz, and I...this was always meant to be a temporary situation, anyway. I was always going to go back—why does it make a difference when I do?”

“You know why.” Fitz held her gaze with his own, blue-eyed and steady, until she finally flushed and dropped her eyes to her lap. Because she did know why. And she suspected that if she let herself stay with him much longer, it wouldn't be a question of when she went back. It would be if she went back at all.

 

Four days later, Jemma left for the Playground. She'd told herself that she wouldn't spend any more time with Fitz, but then she found herself knocking on his door the night before she left, suitcase in hand and without any kind of plausible explanation. Fitz didn't ask for one. Or for anything, really. They spent the entire night curled up together on his couch, eating takeout from their favorite Chinese place and watching an endless stream of Netflix until she fell asleep wrapped in his arms and it was so simple and ordinary that Jemma almost wanted to cry. When he kissed her good bye, she kissed him back hard enough that she nearly drew blood but eventually he drew back and teased her about her monogrammed luggage and she teased him right back, smile stretched a little too thin. _Nothing serious, remember?_

Jemma Simmons sent Leo Fitz six postcards over the next few months. Five of them didn't say much, a few lines in her neat handwriting on the back of a series of cheesy photos of various tropical paradises that Jemma had never actually visited. A few “wish you were here's”, a joke about him being helpless without her, a “love, Jemma” written so small that it was nearly illegible. The sixth one said _Something you made saved someone's life today_ and it arrived on his doorstep three days before she did.

“Jemma?” he asked, blinking sleepily down at her. “Jemma, you're...I'm not dreaming, am I?”

“You're not dreaming. I...I'm not surprised you have TARDIS pajamas,” she informed him and cursed herself a moment later. She opened her mouth to try again, to explain everything to him—the obelisk, the city, the temple, Skye trapped down there with Raina and something no one understood, Trip rushing in at the last minute. He'd nearly died down there—if it hadn't been for Fitz, and the body armor prototypes he'd constantly been making Trip test, he would have. Trip had still been on bed rest when she left the base, although already feeling well enough to start cracking jokes about the awesome prosthetic arm she could ask Fitz to make for him. (“Like the Winter Soldier's, but not that scary.”) Skye had conscripted two of the Koenigs and Bobbi to bring her hourly updates on his condition while she was in quarantine and she'd gone straight to him the minute they let her out, perched by his bedside with worry written plainly across her face and an endless list of questions for the doctors. Jemma had watched Skye's face as she stared down at Trip, the smile she reserved especially for him, the way the light came back into Skye's eyes when he woke up, and something had _shifted_. Snapped into place. And as soon as she could, she'd caught the next flight to Fitz. “I...” she tried again. “I came here because I realized—because I couldn't—because I do, after all.” She trailed off, helpless

“I know, Jemma. I know. Me too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Annnnd we're done! Thank you to everyone for kudosing, commenting, and following along! 
> 
> Chapter title from "Ho Hey" by the Lumineers


End file.
